Thursday, May 29, 2014

The previous post addressed the intellectual and ethical
roots of and justifications for Nazism. That blog post received much pushback.
No, a minority of readers insisted. Catholicism is Nazism, or, maybe, all
Christianity is Nazism. Such 1984-style Big Lies are all too prominent.

MSNBC gives us this Big Lie: Holocaust survivors who
managed to create a life for themselves after World War Two did so because they
benefited from white privilege.

Those Holocaust survivors who managed to make a life for
themselves did so because of several factors. Those factors include the
admirable unity, generosity and support of their fellow Jews and many
Christians living in the US.

They were able to do so because they exhibited the
gumption necessary to start from scratch after losing everything. Hard work.
Self-sacrifice. Humility. Faith and hope. Getting up and going on in spite of
nightmares and memories of all that was lost. It takes an awesome amount of
soul and guts to do that, and they did it. These survivors exhibited quiet
heroism and anyone who can't see that is lost.

Above is a photo of Viktor Frankl, author of "Man's Search for Meaning," one of the most profound books ever written. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. He is also a great and international hero. Toure could learn from Frankl.

White privilege had nothing to do with Holocaust survivors' ability to make a life for themselves. A deeply
admirable humanity had everything to do with it. Lies like Toure's blind those who believe them. They lose the great gift these survivors offer -- their example of how to go on when all is lost.

Talk of white privilege when it comes to Holocaust
survivors is obscene.

Some of the very same Politically Correct voices who rush
to rewrite history to mesh with their false ideology and equate Nazism with
Christianity also commit another obscenity. They insist that all whites are
privileged, including Holocaust survivors.

Further, this same Political Correctness that falsely
equates Christianity with Nazism also equates Zionism with Nazism. When it
comes to WW II, hate Christians. When it comes to the survival of Israel, hate
Jews. Always hate somebody, and always rewrite history to meet ideological
ends. Truth is that which serves the Party.

Yes, Nazis were human beings just like
you and me. Yes, Nazis often felt uncomfortable, hesitant, and guilty before,
during and after killings. High profile, very powerful Nazis like SS
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolph Eichmann
publicly complained about how difficult and troubling it was to mass murder
people.

On September 7, 1940, in a speech to
the officers of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler at Metz, Himmler said,

"In Poland in weather forty
degrees below zero, where we had to haul away thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, where we had to have the toughness – you should hear
this but also forget it again immediately – to shoot thousands of leading Poles
… The proud soldier says, 'My God, why do I have to do that, this ridiculous
job here!' – It is much easier to go into combat with a company than to suppress
an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions, or
to haul away people, or to evict crying and hysterical women, or to return our
German racial brethren across the border from Russia and to take care of them…

You have to consider the work of the
S. D. man or of the man of the Security Police as a vital part of our whole
work just like the fact that you can carry arms. You are the men to be envied because
… if a unit achieves fame …it can be decorated. It's much more difficult in
other positions… in this silent, compulsion work, this silent activity."

Adolf Eichmann also complained about
how unpleasant it was to mass murder people.

"But I also remember today
driving through Lemberg, on the outskirts, and seeing for the first time
something I had never seen before, namely a fountain of blood. I passed a site
where Jews had been shot some time before and where - apparently as a result of
the pressure of the gasses - the blood was shooting out of the earth like a
fountain…These are the four official journeys I was instructed to make, and
during which I came into direct contact with the extermination of the Jews. I
came into contact against my will - I had to obey, I had to do it. I cannot
state anything further on this matter."

Not just famous Nazis complained. Ordinary,
average Nazis complained about how onerous it was to mass murder people. At
first, Nazis killed their victims by shooting them. The Einsatzgruppen did this
work. They complained about it. A more impersonal method had to be found, and
it was. Gassing was the new, impersonal method of mass murder. Gassing was
invented to spare Germans the psychological roadblocks to mass murder.

When Nazis felt uncomfortable,
hesitant, or guilty, they used their Nazi ethics to buck themselves up.

This is all a matter of public record.
Nazi ethics are visible in propaganda films like "Olympia,"
"Triumph of the Will," "Jud Suss," and "The Eternal
Jew," in thousands of propaganda posters, in Nazi diaries and speech
transcripts.

One foundation of Nazism was romantic
nationalism and neo-Paganism. Johann Gottfried von Herder, a philosopher who
lived in the eighteenth century, is credited with sparking nationalism in
Germany.

Here is an excerpt from Herder:

"The savage who loves himself,
his wife, and his child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity for his
tribe as for his own life is, it seems to me, a more genuine being than that
cultured shade who is enchanted by the shadow of his whole species."

Herder is saying it's better to be a
"savage" who loves his own tribe than it is to be an educated person
who loves all humanity. It's pretty clear that this statement is a rejection of
the Good Samaritan parable.

"In his poor hut, [the savage] finds
room for every stranger, receives him as a brother with impartial good humor
and never asks whence he came. The inundated heart of the idle cosmopolitan is
a home for no one....

No greater injury can be inflicted on
a nation than to be robbed of her national character, the peculiarity of her
spirit and her language. Reflect on this and you will perceive our irreparable
loss. Look about you in Germany for the character of the nation, for their own
particular cast of thought, for their own peculiar vein of speech; where are
they?

Read Tacitus; there you will find
their character: 'The tribes of Germany, who never degrade themselves by
mingling with others, form a peculiar, unadulterated, original nation, which is
its own archetype. Even their physical development is universally uniform,
despite the large numbers of the people,' and so forth.

Now look about you and say: 'The
tribes of Germany have been degraded by mingling with others; they have
sacrificed their natural disposition in protracted intellectual servitude; and,
since they have, in contrast to others, imitated a tyrannical prototype for a
long time, they are, among all the nations of Europe, the least true to
themselves.'

If Germany were only guided by the
forces of the age, by the leading strings of her own culture, our intellectual
disposition would doubtless be poor and restricted; but it would be true to our
own soil, fashioned upon its own model, and not so misshapen and cast down."

The Brothers Grimm took up Herder's
call and published wildly successful books on folklore, claiming that their
folklore was a key to the German nation, soil, and soul. The Grimms interwove
neo-Paganism and nature worship with their German nationalism. Jacob Grimm
wrote that myth "is properest to that nation with whose gods it closely
coalesces." Get in touch with Germany's folklore; get in touch with German
nature and earth, and get in touch with old, Germanic Gods.

The Grimms insisted that their
folklore had no foreign impurities. Although "combinations" caused by
"peaceful intercourse or war" might produce "gain,"
"language" did best when pure of foreign interference. The Grimms
wanted to be able to present "purely German fare"; "nothing is
as edifying or as likely to bring more joy than the products of the
Fatherland". "Long lines of Teutonic peoples" were required for
the production of the best "poesie"; "blendings with foreign
peoples" "disintegrated" poesie and drove it to
"extinction".

"Nations hold fast by
prescription: we shall never understand their tradition, their superstition,
unless we spread under it a bed on still heathen soil". The German
characteristic of "thoughtful earnestness," for example, helped the
German language shed the undesirable traits which came from Slavs, whose
mythology was "several degrees wilder and grosser than German".

The Grimms insisted that their folklore was an unimpeachable product of nature, German nature, and thus beyond criticism, and close to sacred.

"Nature itself is our best
witness, for she has let these flowers and leaves grow in these colors and
shapes; whoever fails to find them right for certain needs, unknown to nature,
can pass right by them, but ought not to demand that they therefore be colored
and cut in a different fashion....Everything that is natural can also be
healthy...".

...we do not intend to praise these
tales or even to defend them against opposing views: their very existence
suffices to protect them. Whatever has succeeded in bringing so much pleasure
so often, and has at the same time moved and instructed, has its own inner
justification and must have flowed from the eternal wellspring that bedews all
life."

Because they were natural and German,
the Grimms' folklore was a proper guide to behavior: "we wanted...that the
book serve as a manual of manners".

The occupying Allied forces in Germany
after World War II confiscated the Grimms' books as part of de-Nazification.

Another proponent of nationalism in
Germany was Richard Wagner, the great musician. Wagner was an anti-Semite. But Jews
were not the only hated other for nationalistic Germans in the nineteenth
century. Kulturkampf and Hakata, also known as the German Eastern Marches
Society, targeted Poles.

The massive, c. 1880-1924 immigration of Eastern and Southern and East Asian peasants to the US had an impact on the development of Nazism. Source

Trends in the United States would also
come to provide ethical and intellectual foundations for Nazism.

Between, roughly, 1880 and 1929, a
massive influx of peasant immigrants overwhelmed American consciousness. Note
the word "consciousness" – I'm not talking about what happened in the
streets or in the mines or in the tenements – I'm talking about what happened
in human minds.

Americans had electricity, indoor
plumbing, democracy, literacy. These new peasant immigrants from East Asia and
Eastern and Southern Europe included recent serfs who had little to no
experience of money, writing, shoes, self-government, or bathing.

The numbers were overwhelming. Here's
a vivid description from H. G. Wells. A visitor to Ellis Island

"is taken through vast barracks
littered with people of every European race, every type of low-class European
costume, and every degree of dirtiness, to a central hall in which the gist of
the examining goes on …

day after day, incessantly, the
immigrants go, wild-eyed Gipsies, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Ruthenians, Cossacks,
German peasants, Scandinavians, a few Irish still, impoverished English,
occasional Dutch; they halt for a moment at little desks to exhibit papers, at
other little desks to show their money and prove they are not paupers, to have
their eyes scanned by this doctor and their general bearing by that. Their
thumb-marks are taken, their names and heights and weights and so forth are
recorded for the card index; and so, slowly, they pass along towards America,
and at last reach a little wicket, the gate of the New World.

Through this metal wicket drips the immigration
stream – all day long, every two or three seconds, an immigrant with a valise
or a bundle, passes the little desk and goes on past the well-managed
money-changing place, past the carefully organised separating ways that go to
this railway or that, past the guiding, protecting officials – into a new
world.

They stand in a long string, waiting
to go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with cheap
portmanteaus with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone, women with
children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All day that string of
human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; all day and every day,
constantly replenished, constantly dropping the end beads through the wicket,
till the units mount to hundreds and the hundreds to thousands."

The differences between peasant
immigrants and Americans were overwhelming. Here, from a House Executive
Document, is a horrified description of Slovak peasants

"Their homes are often nothing
but scanty huts, of one room, wherein the whole family lives and sleeps
promiscuously. The furniture and outfit is very primitive, mostly homemade, and
has to last for generations ...

The body clothes of the men are made
of coarse linen, their summer clothing of the same material, only coarser, and
in winter their clothing consists of suits made from a coarse and thick woolen
felting, in the natural color of the wool; an everlasting cap of the sheepskin
and a pair of sandals about complete an outfit which has been in vogue with
them for generations and which may be an heirloom, since the style hardly ever
changes. An important part of their outfit is the roomy and long mantle without
sleeves, made up from half a dozen sheepskins which are tanned, the wool being
left on ... when the men are away from home these mantles form their complete
bed. What these patriarchal cloaks may lack in style is generally made up for
by some gaudy embroidery or even painting on the leather side of it…In all, it
will be seen that the tastes of these people are anything but refined, are low,
in fact."

Americans didn't know how to
understand these peasants who were invading their "new and clean
country," as Labor Secretary James J Davis, in an anti-immigrant article,
put it.

Science stepped in. Science would
explain the peasant immigrants to America. In an address before the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Albert Edward Jenks announced,
"The greatest problem before America today is the immigration problem ...
This great problem is at base anthropological ... as out of these different
physical characteristics of the different breeds of people come the psychic characteristics
of the different breeds of people"

Science, at that time, was informed by
Darwin, who had published "Origin of Species" in 1859.

Myth is the foundational narrative of
a culture. The great folklore scholar Bronislaw Malinowski described myth as a
people's charter for belief. A people's myth can be compared to the US
Constitution. It prescribes what people can do and can't do, what they should
and should not do.

Before Darwin, the dominant myth in
the West was the Judeo-Christian myth. In this myth, one omnipotent, unique,
creator God, in an act of love, created the universe, one time.

I tell my students over and over,
"A fish doesn't know it is in water." A Westerner who has never lived
under any other myths probably doesn't realize the uniqueness of the
Judeo-Christian myth. Many of my students just assume that every religion is
about a unique, omnipotent God who creates one universe one time in an act of
love, and that everybody believes that "all men are created equal."

That's just not so, of course. Just
one example, of many possible examples: Hinduism's Rig Veda describes the
creation of the world as the sacrifice of the primal man, Parusha. Parusha's
mouth becomes the Brahmans, high caste people. His arms become the princes, or
kshatriya, those ranked second in caste hierarchy. The rest of Parusha's body
is similarly allotted to various castes. This myth justifies the caste system.
In Hindu myth, people are very much NOT created equal. This myth is thousands
of years old. With it as justification, as charter, low caste and untouchable
Hindus are condemned to hellish lives. They are not equal. They are inferior.
Their inferiority is sealed by myth.

Compare this Vedic myth to Talmudic commentary
on Genesis, as retold by Nathan Ausubel:

"Why did God create only one Adam
and not many at a time? He did this to demonstrate that one man in himself is
an entire universe. Also He wished to teach mankind that he who kills one human
being is as guilty as if he had destroyed the entire world. Similarly, he who
saves the life of one single human being is as worthy as if he had saved all of
humanity.

God created only one man so that
people should not try to feel superior to one another and boast of their
lineage in this wise: 'I am descended from a more distinguished Adam than you.'

He also did this so that the heathen
should not be able to say that since many men had been created at the same
time, it was conclusive proof that there was more than one God. Lastly, He did
this in order to establish His own power and glory. When a maker of coins does
his work he uses only one mould and all the coins emerge alike. But the Kings
of Kings, blessed be His name, has created all mankind in the mould of Adam,
and even so no man is identical to another. For this reason each person must
respect himself and say with dignity, 'God created the world on my account.
Therefore let me not lose eternal life because of some vain passion!'"

This myth encountered challenges, for
example after Columbus discovered America. Were the Indians human? Yes,
insisted heroes like Father Bartolome de las Casas. De las Casas said that in
the Indians persecuted by conquistadors he saw "Jesus Christ, our God,
scourged and afflicted and beaten and crucified, not once, but thousands of times."
That is a remarkable statement. No Greek follower of Zeus saw Zeus in the
barbarians or helots he conquered. It would be anathema for a Muslim to see
Allah in an infidel he decapitated. This myth is, simply, different from other
myths. With Sublimus Dei, the Vatican agreed: Indians are human beings. Just
like us.

Nazism was a challenge. Catholicism
insistently, stubbornly, stuck to the idea that we are all equal children of
God, as in this 1943 quote from Vatican Radio: "Every man bears the stamp
of God." Some Catholics did buy into Scientific Racism. But, compared to
other institutions, the Catholic Church was more significant as a resistor of
Scientific Racism than as an adopter. As one SS critic put it, "The Pope
has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order. His speech is one
long attack on everything we stand for. God, he says, regards all peoples and
races as worthy of the same consideration. Here he is clearly speaking in
behalf of the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war
criminals." Similar statements can be found here.

No one argues that all Jews and
Christians, all the time, have perfectly adhered to the implications of this
myth. Atrocity happens: slavery, conquest, war. The point is, rather, that this
was the guiding myth, the narrative that a culture's heroes, famous and
obscure, strove to live their lives by, the North Star they struggled to follow,
the ideal they hoped to live up to, the still small voice that kept them awake
at night, the legacy they worked to pass on.

As Richard Dawkins put it,
"Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin
made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist"

Jettisoning the Judeo-Christian myth,
and putting Darwinism in its place, was followed by self-identified Darwinists
who deduced that, since there is no loving, creator God who made people of
other races your brother, since there was no eternal consequence for harming
another, since there was no real equality, well, you could put human beings in
zoos and put human beings in ovens. And so you did. And you
very much did cite your understanding of Darwinism as your guiding myth.
And you very much did cite the Judeo-Christian myth as an outdated
superstition, that weakened you and that you needed to erase ASAP.

The Judeo-Christian myth of human
equality relied on faith. It relied on believing what you could plainly see was
not true. People aren't equal. Some are better looking. Some are smarter. Some
are healthier. Some are more useful. Science relies on evidence, not faith. Evidence.
The evidence is right there in front of your eyes. And so Karl Pearson, who
gave us statistics, and Carl Brigham, who gave us the SAT, and Margaret Sanger,
who gave us Planned Parenthood, all went to work on proving that peasant
immigrants were as inferior as they seemed, and worthy of restriction, or
outright elimination.

Everyone was on board. All American
presidents during this era. The Ivy League schools. Right wingers. Left
wingers. (Pearson changed his name from Carl to Karl to honor Marx.) The
mainstream press, the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the Museum of
Natural History. The Bronx Zoo. Everyone could plainly see that these peasant
immigrants were specimens of an inferior race.

Lothrop Stoddard, Harvard PhD, a
terrifically influential scientific racist, wrote "The Revolt Against
Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man." Stoddard cited Darwin as the
"epoch maker" who inspired scientific racism.

"Let us now consider the rise of
the new biology, which has already exerted so powerful an influence upon our philosophy
of life and which promises to affect profoundly the destinies of mankind.
Modern biology can be said to date from the publication of Darwin's work on The
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in the year 1859. This epoch-making
book … marked nothing short of a revolution in the realm of ideas…"

Madison Grant was a great American.
Good friend of Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. Concerned scientist.
Contributed to preservation of the redwood and the bison. Cofounded the Bronx
Zoo. His "Passing of the Great Race" contains echoes of Darwin, and
foreshadows Hitler, who would write to Grant to tell him that
"Passing" was his "bible." Grant specifically identified
Christianity, and its idea of the worth of each, individual human life, as the
enemy of the scientific racist, an enemy whom scientific racism would need to,
and would, defeat in the battleground of ideas.

"The laws of nature require the
obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to
the community or race. It is highly unjust that a minute minority should be
called upon to supply brains for the unthinking mass.

The church assumes a serious
responsibility toward the future of the race whenever it steps in and preserves
a defective strain ... A great injury is done to the community by the
perpetuation of worthless types. These strains are apt to be meek and lowly,
and as such make a strong appeal to the sympathies of the successful. Before
eugenics were understood much could be said from a Christian … view-point in
favor of indiscriminate charity … [now we know charity does] more injury to the
race than black death or smallpox.

A rigid system of selection through
the elimination of those who are weak or unfit – in other words, social
failures – would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as
enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane
asylums."

Scientific racist Madison Grant's
comparison of Christianity to smallpox would be echoed later by twenty-first
century scientific atheist Richard Dawkins, who would compare religion to
smallpox.

And there you have it. Christianity is
the enemy because Christianity insists on seeing a worthy humanity where there
is no scientific evidence of any worthy humanity. It insists on faith, on
seeing what is unseen, on seeing invisible value in apparently worthless human
specimens.

Grant did put a human being in the
Bronx Zoo: Ota Benga.

Christians vociferously protested the
placing of a human being in the Bronx Zoo.

"The Rev. James H. Gordon,
superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn…said. 'We think
we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.'" Source:
NYT

Learned scientists laughed at their
silly Christian ideas of humans and souls. "Mayor George McClellan, for
example, refused to meet with the clergymen or to support their cause. For this
he was congratulated by the zoo’s director, William Temple Hornaday, a major
figure not only in the zoo’s history but also in the history of American
conservation, who wrote to him, 'When the history of the Zoological Park is
written, this incident will form its most amusing passage.'" Source:
NYT

The New York Times approved. Ota Benga
"belongs to a race that 'scientists do not rate high in the human
scale…The idea that men are all much alike … is now far out of date.'"

Lidice massacre, occupied Czechoslovakia. Source: Wikipedia

Let's jump, without any attempt at a
segue, without any attempt at creating comfortable distance, from
immigrant-overrun, scientific America to the funeral of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi
"protector" – that really was what the Nazis called him – of what is
now the Czech Republic. Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, a Czech and a Slovak,
assassinated Heydrich; the Nazis, in retaliation, wiped out the village of
Lidice.

"We will have to deal with
Christianity in a tougher way than hitherto. We must settle accounts with this
Christianity, this greatest of plagues that could have happened to us in our
history, which has weakened us in every conflict. If our generation does not do
it then it would I think drag on for a long time. We must overcome it within
ourselves … We shall once again have to find a new scale of values for our
people: the scale of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the starry sky above us
and the world in us, the world that we see in the microscope.

Man is nothing special at all…He has
no idea how a fly is constructed—however unpleasant, it is a miracle—or how a
blossom is constructed. He must once again look with deep reverence into this
world. Then he will acquire the right sense of proportion about what is above
us, about how we are woven into this cycle.

Then, on a different plane, something
else must happen: we must once again be rooted in our ancestors and
grandchildren, in this eternal chain and eternal sequence … By rooting our
people in a deep ideological awareness of ancestors and grandchildren we must
once more persuade them that they must have sons … everything that we do must
be justifiable vis-à-vis the clan, our ancestors. If we do not secure this
moral foundation which is the deepest and best because the most natural, we
will not be able to overcome Christianity on this plane and create the Germanic
Reich which will be a blessing for the earth. That is our mission as a nation
on this earth. For thousands of years it has been the mission of this blond
race to rule the earth and again and again to bring it happiness and culture."

In another speech, delivered a year
later, Himmler spoke to his fellow SS officers.

"One basic principle must be the
absolute rule for the S.S. men. We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely
to members of our own blood and nobody else. What happens to a Russian and a
Czech does not interest me in the least. What the nations can offer in the way
of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their
children and raising them here with us.

Whether nations live in prosperity or
starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our
culture: otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian
females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me
only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never
be tough and heartless where it is not necessary, that is clear.

We, Germans, who are the only people
in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a
decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our
blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and
grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes up to me
and says: 'I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and children, it is
inhuman, for it would kill them,' then I have to say: 'You are the murderer of
your own blood, because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug German soldiers will
die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood....' Our
concern, our duty, is our people and our blood. We can be indifferent to
everything else. I wish the S.S. to adopt this attitude towards the problem of
all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians....

Most of you will know what it means
when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And
to have seen this through, and to have remained decent, has made us hard and is
a page of glory.

We have the moral right, we had the
duty to our people to do it, to kill … we exterminated the bacillus, we don't
want to become sick and die from the same bacillus.

I will never see it happen, that even
one bit of putrefaction comes in contact with us, or takes root in us. On the
contrary, where it might try to take root, we will burn it out together. But
altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the
love of our people. And we have taken on no defect within us, in our soul, or
in our character."

It frightens and saddens me that
something as big and as utterly public as Nazism could be the object of so much
politically-motivated obfuscation. No, Nazism was not an expression of
Christianity.

Nazism's roots could not be more
obvious. Nazis themselves announced publicly and often their thought processes.

The Big Lie never dies. Good people
must always resist it. And we must invite our friends to learn the truth.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

"Forget Us
Not" is an award-winning, seventy-minute documentary presenting the
experiences of what are referred to as Nazism's "other victims." History's
focus is on the six million Jews the Nazis murdered because Nazism's focus was
on Jews.

But it is a tragedy, and a great lie, that too many
people have no idea that Nazism also targeted non-Jews. When I speak about the
Holocaust, I ask audiences, "What group did the Nazis mass murder first
and last, even after they surrendered to the Allies?"

No one has yet been able to answer that question. The
answer is handicapped Germans. If you are surprised, you don't understand
Nazism. A good first step would be viewing "Forget Us Not."

Ron Perlman provides sonorous narration. Archival black
and white film clips are interspersed throughout, including one brief,
insufferable shot of Nazis laughing. Lieutenant Commander Jack H. Taylor,
"the first Navy Seal," testifies to the horrors of Mauthausen. What
music there is is excellent.

Most of "Forget Us Not" consists of four living
survivors telling their own stories. Wilhelm Heckman's story is told via
voiceover narration and photographs. Heckman was a musician and alleged to be a
homosexual; he was interned in Mauthausen.

Robert Wagemann is the most articulate interviewee. Before
his birth, his mother was imprisoned for distributing Jehovah's Witness pamphlets.
His mother's obstetrician was Jewish, and thanks to Nazi policies, he disappeared.
Wagemann was a breach birth, and his mother had only a midwife for help. Wagemann's
hip was injured.

When Wagemann was five years old, he was ordered to
report for a physical. His mother overheard a doctor saying that he'd break for
lunch, come back, and murder Wagemann. Nazi Aktion T4 was designed to eliminate
defective people. Wagemann's mother grabbed her son and rushed to the exit. A
nun blocked their escape; Wagemann's mother was insistent. She took her naked
son to a riverbank and dressed him in the privacy of the reeds.

Wagemann said his goal was to communicate to young people
living in the West how fortunate they are, and what kind of freedom they have. "Tolerance
and conscience is the most important thing," he says. "To fight
racism and hate you have to have tolerance. You have to look upon the next
person as your human brother and human sister. You have to help him when he is
in need...if you cut yourself what comes out is red. If he cuts himself, it's
the same color."

Ceija Stojka was an Austrian-Romani survivor of Auschwitz
and Bergen-Belsen. Her family was Catholic. Her interview offers the most graphic
details of horror. She describes the death of her little brother Ossi from
typhus, dead bodies of babies rolling out of trains when the doors were opened,
and her attempt to match decapitated heads to appropriate bodies when she came
upon an "insanely large" pile of corpses.

Natalia Orloff-Klauer was Ukrainian. Her parents were
rounded up and used by the Nazis as slave laborers. Her experience was one of
slow starvation and hideous conditions. Her mother became ill, never recovered,
and died shortly after the war. Later, Orloff-Klauer survived the firebombing
of Dresden. Even rescue presented nightmares; survivors had to be stripped
naked, shaved, deloused, and paraded for inspection. After the war she lived in
a damaged railway car. The Grace Presbyterian Church of Wichita, Kansas
sponsored the surviving members of her family and made it possible for her to
come to the US.

Veronika Young was a Polish slave laborer. Her interview
was the least satisfying. Young repeatedly stated that she did not remember key
details, including the name of the town she was born in. She said things like
"It was horrible." I wish the filmmaker had found a more articulate
and authoritative Polish survivor. There are certainly all too many Polish
survivors of Nazi atrocities. After Jews and Gypsies/Rom, Poles were the most
persecuted national group under the Nazis. The Poles' role in WW II was key, and
better understanding of what the Nazis did to Poles would help the viewer.

Filmmaker Heather E. Connell's previous work addressed
orphans in Cambodia. Her humanitarian approach is clear. Connell devotes the final
twenty minutes of the film to the founding of the United Nations, to mention of
other genocides, and to each survivor's exhortations to the audience. Realize
how lucky you are, survivors insist to young viewers. Be tolerant. Take care of
each other. Never again.

The "other victims" are often ignored for
ideological reasons. I know students who have been lead to believe by Christophobic
scholars and media that Nazism was a Christian phenomenon; in fact, Nazism
vowed to destroy Christianity and Dachau was known as Germany's largest
monastery, because of all the clergy interned there.

"Forget Us Not" doesn't provide enough
information to the viewer to understand how each group of victims differed.
Yes, Nazis killed Ukrainians, but it's important to remember that Ukrainians,
at first, were significant in their level of collaboration and genocidal
killings of Poles. Jehovah's Witnesses were concentration camp inmates, but
they were accorded relatively preferential treatment.

"Three million Polish citizens marked with the
letter P met their deaths in the camps," the film states. Three million Polish
non-Jews did not die in concentration camps. Young says she was in Saarbrucken
concentration camp and Orloff-Klauer says she was in Bibigan concentration
camp; I cannot find either in lists of the camps. Otherwise, though, for its
intimate portraits of "other victims," this film is recommended.

Monday, May 19, 2014

The Anti-Defamation League recently released results of a
massive survey. The sad news is that anti-Semitism is widespread. Neil J.
Kressel, whose book "Sons of Pigs and Apes" I recently reviewed on
this blog (here)
wrote in the New York Post that much more attention should be paid to the ADL
study than is currently being paid. "No Ignoring a Billion
Anti-Semites" appeared in the New York Post on May 15, 2014.

Here is an excerpt from Dr. Kressel's New York Post
article:

***

There are 1.09 billion anti-Semites in the world today.
That’s right: more than a billion — about 135 for every Jew.

These are bigots who believe Jews are greedy, unethical
manipulators who control the world and cause everything bad: 9/11. Financial
crises. Communism. Dyspepsia. Name it.

It’s a stunning, hard-to-believe figure. But it comes
from one of the most credible, comprehensive studies on the subject ever. And
in an honest, sane, fair world, it would be a clarion call for immediate,
steadfast action.

The study, released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation
League, included 53,100 respondents. Interviews were conducted in 96 languages
in more than 100 countries. How did the researchers decide who is an
anti-Semite?...

Americans (along with Australians, British and a few
others) typically score among the most tolerant in the world. Indeed, many
Americans have very positive attitudes toward Jews…

Disproportionately, anti-Semites hail from (no surprise)
the Middle East and North Africa, where nearly three out of four endorse a
whole slew of anti-Jewish beliefs. Some 92 percent of Iraqis, for example,
qualified as anti-Semites, as did 69 percent of Turks.

Still, 880 million anti-Semites do not live in the Middle
East or North Africa. The disease is global: Among Poles: at least 45 percent
qualify as anti-Semites. Greeks: 69 percent. Malaysians: 61 percent. Russians:
30 percent. Spaniards: 29 percent. Germans: 27 percent. (They say the Germans
will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.)… Among those worldwide who have
heard of the Holocaust, (54 percent), about one in three believes it is either
a myth or has been greatly exaggerated.

In the Middle East and North Africa, that figure is
nearly two in three. And the problem is getting worse. Young people are less
likely to know about the Holocaust and less likely to accept what historians
say about it.

***

New York Magazine published an article, "The ADL's
Flawed Anti-Semitism Survey," that is critical of the study. You can read
that here.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

I am saddened when I encounter those voices in Polonia
who insist that Bieganski, the Brute Polak stereotype will "die out"
as "Poles become better educated and stop being peasants."

I am also saddened when I encounter Polonians who say,
"Please read Tim Snyder's 'Bloodlands.' Once you realize how much we
suffered at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, you won't stereotype us anymore."

Stereotypes don't work that way. There is no evidence in the
ample scholarship on stereotyping to support either of the above conclusions.

Bieganski, the Brute Polak stereotype, as described in
the book "Bieganski,"
is very much alive and well, and will continue to flourish in newspapers, school
curricula, church sermons, and other cultural products for as long as Polonia
chooses to refuse to address him in
a strategic manner.

Dumb Polak jokes come and go, novels like "Sophie's
Choice" rise and fall, media panics like that surrounding the publication
of Jan Tomasz Gross' "Neighbors" flare up and die down, but Bieganski
is the background source, and the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype is alive
and well, and will continue to inspire new products.

One such new product is "Generation War," which
was shown first on German television and now on the BBC.

In the Guardian newspaper discussion page devoted to this
miniseries, one viewer wrote to protest,

"the demonisation of the Polish [Armia Krajowa or Home
Army] partisans as anti-semites prepared to kill Jews, in contrast with the
sympathetic portrayal of the [German, Nazi] central characters, none of whom
express anti-semitic sentiments.

I understand that contemporary Germans might find it hard
to accept that their own parents and grandparents committed mind-boggling war
crimes, and would like a more sympathetic portrayal of innocent young people
caught up in something they did not understand, and later could not get out of.
However, this programme goes too far in distorting the truth. I am not Jewish
or Polish, but feel insulted on their behalf."

Other viewers, though, insisted that Poland was an
anti-Semitic country, and that anyone who complained about the depiction of
Polish war heroes as rabid anti-Semites was just a "cry baby."

A Polish Home Army veteran is suing over "Generation
War." Sadly, he and most of Poland is unaware of "Bieganski";
there is no Polish-language version of the book. It is being held up by a lack
of funds for translation.

"Bieganski" is needed in Poland. It is needed
in curricula in America. One poster, named "Deborah," who appears to
be American, wrote in response to the furor over "Generation War,"

"Are you aware of the Warsaw ghetto uprising that
occurred a year before the Warsaw uprising during which the aka refused to get
involved or even supply any aid? Nobody disputes that the Holocaust was
instituted by the Germans but there was a reason most of it took place in
Poland – anti-semitism was so inbred that it was a fertile ground.

I am extremely grateful to those 6,000 + heroes who
risked their lives but if I recall correctly the Polish population was about 60
million at the time and while I certainly understand why someone would not want
to risk his life or the lives of his family, I can’t understand why someone
would voluntarily turn in a jewish neighbor for a keg of beer."

Deborah's comment is full of historical errors. Her new
name for the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, as the "aka" will cause
some to laugh. But her deployment of the Bieganski stereotype is condoned in
American classrooms, media, and political decisions. Polonia, wake up. Educate
people like Deborah.

Here is a snip from a Krakow Post article about the
lawsuit:

A veteran of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) has
filed a civil case in the Krakow District Court against controversial German TV
drama, Our Mothers, Our Fathers, which is set during World War II.

The former soldier, whose name has not been made public,
joined forces with the World Association of Home Army Soldiers (Światowy
Związek Żołnierzy Armii Krajowej) to file a case against the series’ producer,
Nico Hofmann, on the grounds that it tarnishes the reputations of Poles who
fought against Nazi occupation. Attorney Monika Brzozowska, with PDB, the law
firm representing the complainants, confirmed the court’s civil department had
received the summons.

The drama has caused considerable offence among many
Poles for its depiction of Polish Home Army soldiers displaying anti-Semitic
sentiments. It has also been accused of implicating Poles in the atrocities of
the Holocaust and playing down German responsibility. In one scene, a Home Army
soldier boasts: “We drown Jews like rats,” while his compatriots are shown
refusing to help Jews bound for Auschwitz.

The series was commissioned by German public broadcaster,
ZDF, and broadcast in German and Austria (as Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter) in
March, 2013, finding a large audience and critical acclaim. The three,
90-minute episodes were shown by Polish broadcaster TVP in June (as Nasze
matki, nasi ojcowie). It achieved record ratings, but also provoked anger among
Poles who regarded its depiction of Home Army combatants as grossly unfair.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

In a blog which takes its title from a
character in a book, I thought I might go back to the original who appears in the
1979 novel by William Styron and see him in the context of the story as a
whole. Here, the character of Bieganski is a brute only in the sense that he is
repellent, but he is hardly a simpleton. He is a right-wing professor and Nazi
sympathiser and the father of Sophie of the book's title. Indeed, Sophie's
Cracovian family are altogether unaccountably sympathetic to all things German.
Bieganski may be a peripheral character in a way, and yet his malign influence
on his daughter persists. I won't give away what happens to him; suffice it to
say it is not what he expects.

Although the novel is largely
well-written, this is a difficult book to like or even just to admire. Had it
not been for its (indirect) association with this blog, I probably would not
have persevered. At its best it is a harrowing evocation of the horror of Nazi
atrocities and also a depiction of seriously damaged people. At its worst it
degenerates into sweeping generalizations and there are even graphic and
sexually explicit passages which some readers might consider objectionable and
certainly seem totally incongruous, given the overall theme of the book. Although
the main character is portrayed on the whole with some compassion, the fact
that some of the most overtly anti-Semitic pronouncements are attributed to
this same person, (see her drunken rant in Chapter 12), the overall tone is frequently
negative about Poland and the Poles, even though, in fairness, Styron gives
credit to the Polish Resistance for their efforts on behalf of Jews – (see also
Chapter 12).

Whether readers think that, despite
the depressing theme, the writing is stylistically impressive in parts, with
many American literary allusions, or whether they are put off by the many gratuitously
explicit passages, not to mention the offensive use of the word 'Polack', the
novel does show the results of a certain degree of research into the subject of
the Holocaust. However, it does raise the odd question: for instance, what is
the basis of Styron's claim, towards the end of Chapter 9, that Hitler's
friend, Governor General Hans Frank, was, in Styron's words "a Jew, mirabile dictu"?

"Nor was Professor Biegański a
true quisling, a collaborator in the now accepted sense of the word, since when
the country was invaded that September and Cracow, virtually unharmed, became
the seat of government for all Poland, it was not with the intent to betray his
fatherland that he sought to offer his services to the Governor General, Hitler's
friend Hans Frank ( a Jew, mirabile dictu
– though few at the time knew it, including the Professor – and a distinguished
lawyer like himself), but only as an advisor and expert in a field where Poles
and Germans had a mutual adversary and a profound common interest – die Judenfrage. There was doubtless even
a certain idealism in his effort."

And during an intensely anti-Polish
tirade in Chapter 15, which is delivered, ironically enough, by a character who
is described as a patriotic Polish resistance fighter, there is a reference to
atrocities committed by both right-wing (mistakenly called ONR, which had
ceased to exist at this point) and left-wing extremists, but the character also
claims that Poles "practically invented anti-Semitism" – there is no
mention of persecution of Jews by any other European country in the Middle Ages
– and that "we Poles originated" the concept of the ghetto – again no
mention of the Venetian or other European Ghettos.

Final verdict: tragic, challenging,
depressing, shocking and horrifying in places, but ultimately bleak and
unedifying. I would not recommend it to anyone hoping to get a true picture of
conditions in Poland during the war. The film version is in many ways sanitized
but perhaps more powerful than the book because of the sharper focus and because
of the nature of the medium itself.

- Michal Karski

***

Anyone interested in William Styron's Sophie's Choice and its distorted
depiction of World War II in Poland and Polish history should read the Spring,
1983 issue of Polish American Studies
devoted to Sophie's Choice.

It would be a service to Polonia and
to combatting the Bieganski stereotype if the articles in that volume were
placed in an easily accessible format on the web.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Harvard-trained social psychologist Neil J. Kressel's
2012 book, "The Sons of Pigs and Apes: Muslim Antisemitism and the
Conspiracy of Silence," takes on taboo topics.

Kressel argues that antisemitism is popularly supported,
openly expressed, and highly influential among Muslims throughout the world,
including Muslims living in England and South Asia, not just the Middle East.
He cites news accounts, research organizations, opinion polls, television,
memoirs and discussion boards. "The word 'Jew' is a slur in the entire
Muslim world" (93). Jews are depicted as categorically different. Jews
cause wars, torture, cannibalize, and plot world domination. Newspapers,
television, school curricula and leaders' public statements exploit the most
extreme motifs from the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and
"Mein Kampf." Muslim liberals like Irshad Manji and Tarek Fatah have negligible
followings and are condemned by other Muslims (196).

Muslim antisemitism is twinned with hostility to the
West. Historian Robert Wistrich wrote that Muslim antisemitism "is the
Trojan Horse designed to undermine the West's beliefs in its own values"
(13).

Kressel explores potential roots for Muslim antisemitism.
In the Koran, Allah turns Jews into pigs and apes. Mohammed made war on Jews
(32). Muslim antisemitism might be projective inversion – Muslims might be
attributing to Jews the hostility that they themselves feel (155). Kressel
explores other potential sources for Muslim antisemitism, including Israel,
colonialism, Christian missionaries, and Nazism.

There are political uses: antisemitism fulfills the need
for a scapegoat. Jews serve as a target for displaced aggression citizenry
cannot express against their non-democratic leaders (121, 167). Jews might also
be convenient scapegoats for leftist agitprop (149). Muslims may be enraged
because in the past Jews were subservient "dhimmis." When Jews
defeated Muslims in the Six Day War, that changed. "There is no prominent
model in Muslim history for treating Jews as equals" (127, 168-9).

Many Western leftists are either silent about or supportive
of antisemitism in the Muslim world. Irish poet Tom Paulin, who taught at
Oxford and Columbia and lectured at Harvard, said, "I understand how
suicide bombers feel." Paulin described Israelis as "racists"
and "Nazis" who "should be shot dead" (74). The scholar John
L. Esposito, who is lavishly funded by a Saudi prince, massages statistics to
erase "700 million" Muslims who acknowledged to polltakers that they
found the 9-11 attacks justifiable (89). While leftists are eager to condemn
antisemitism in Catholic Poland, if they mention Muslim antisemitism they are "delegitimized"
(15). They are accused of "Jewish paranoia" (114). They are
themselves condemned as racists and Islamophobes and leftists reject their
friendship (56).

Prof. Pieter Van Der Horst was encouraged to condemn
Christian antisemitism; he was forbidden from mentioning Muslim antisemitism.
His university cited fear of violence from Muslims as one reason for the
censorship (58). Overt Muslim antisemites are championed as role models (eg
40). Leftists advise coexistence, "even with groups not prepared to
coexist" and pursue "'a Munich-style quest for peace at any
price'" (146-7).

Kressel describes rhetorical strategies exercised by
leftwing Western supporters of Muslim antisemitism. They say things like
"Arabs can't be antisemites because Arabs are Semites." Kressel
points out that the word "antisemite" was coined by racist Jew haters
and it has no meaning as a word describing Arabs. Leftist antisemites argue
that Muslim antisemitism is merely a criticism of Israel. Arab Radio and
Television's 2002 miniseries "Horseman without a Horse," that
dramatized the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" does not constitute
legitimate criticism of Israel. Too, as Kressel shows, leftist criticisms of Israel
dwarf leftist protests of nefarious human rights abusers like Burma and Sudan.

Israel is not, contrary to leftist accusations, an
"apartheid" state; most Israeli Arabs express a wish to live in
Israel, rather than in any Muslim Arab majority nation (118). The question is,
would any leftist, Muslim, or antisemite respond positively to Kressel's book?
Probably not. There is, alas, a sense of "preaching to the choir"
about it.

Kressel is shocked, shocked, that the "anti-racist
community" has not rejected Muslim antisemitism. Kressel never seems to
reach the abundantly obvious conclusion: the "anti-racist community"
he imagines is not at all anti-racist. Rather, the left has a history of
temporarily exploiting the cause it thinks will bring it closer to its goal of
remaking or simply destroying Western Civilization, with its detested
Judeo-Christian roots, and bringing on the utopian worker's paradise.

If a particular group's grudges can serve as lever, and
its hatreds can serve as kindling, yes, the left will make temporary common
cause with that group. For a while the left was supportive of Jews because Jews
were deemed "revolutionary." Not that long ago, the Soviet bloc voted
for the creation of the state of Israel. Leftists currently assess Muslims as
useful for revolutionary purposes, and leftists now align themselves with
Muslims. Leftists' calculations have little to do with sincere opposition to
racism or sexism. Ask Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Condoleezza Rice, two black women
blacklisted by leftists at Brandeis and Rutgers respectively in spring of 2014.

In one passage, Kressel criticizes the cultural
relativism approach taken by many leftists. After all, Esposito insists,
Muslims and Christians are not that different; both cherish "family
values." Kressel says that Esposito never asks if "family
values" means the same thing "across cultural and national
borders" (90).

But Kressel himself takes a cultural relativism approach.
Kressel repeatedly compares Islam to Christianity. He says that all religions
can be interpreted to inspire good or bad behavior. Things were bad in the past
but things got better; Islam can also improve with time (eg 19, 61). Christianity
has a "much stronger" "religious foundation for Jew-hatred"
than Islam (33). Christians are "deeper enemies of Jews";
"pernicious anti-Jewish imagery" is "central" to
Christianity (127). Kressel accuses "Christian missionaries" of
disseminating blood libel to Muslims, but he offers no support for this charge
(162).

Kressel's relativism obscures rather than clarifies.
There is no command in Christianity not to take non-Christians as friends, or
to kill, convert, dominate, humiliate, or tax them. There are such commands in
Islam. Rather, Christians are commanded to love even strangers, as in the Good
Samaritan parable. There is no comparable parable in the Koran. Christians have
certainly mistreated Jews, but the middleman minority status of Jews was the most
frequent spark, not theology.

Contrary to Kressel's statement that popes and priests
were all "bigots" (139), the Vatican repeatedly condemned
antisemitism and violence against Jews. Finally, Kressel conflates Nazis and
Christians (eg 162), saying for example that "Christian churches"
feel "'lingering guilt about the Holocaust'" and that Christianity
took a "genocidal" approach to Jews (124, 151). Nazism was a
neo-Pagan movement inspired by atheist ideas. Nazis cited Darwinian evolution
as ethical support.

On the page after accusing all Christians throughout time
of being bigots, Kressel adduces data that exculpates Jews and atheists of
bigotry (140).

Nazis didn't massacre only Jews; they also massacred
Catholic Poles, Orthodox Russians, and handicapped Germans. These other victims
inform us about the nature of Nazism. Muslim haters don't just target Jews. They
also target Christians, Bahais, Hindus, and Buddhists. Kressel mentions that
many Muslims blame Jews for the 9-11 attacks. But Muslims don't just refuse to
take responsibility for 9-11; they also refuse to take responsibility for other
atrocities, like the Armenian genocide. Had Kressel widened his focus to non-Jewish
victims, even if only for a few brief paragraphs, he would have revealed much
more about the nature of Islam.

Finally, Kessler does not cite Alvin H. Rosenfeld's 2006
essay "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism." He
should have at least mentioned it. Some of the leftist antisemites Kessler
quotes, including Richard Falk, Eli Valley, Zack Furness and Judith Butler,
were born Jewish.

In this review I am not referring to all Muslims, and
neither is Neil J. Kressel. It goes without saying that most Muslims are peace-loving
people who do not act out irrational prejudices. Rather, this review and Kressel's
book are about significant trends.